Myths of Pete Najarian

 Mutual In Love Divine by Pete Najarian

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read Pete Najarian’s The Naked and the Nude, then when his stories of fear, desire, “love,” disappointment, guilt, rejection, rage and loneliness began to repeat themselves, his Mutual in Love Divine. A slightly less objectifying perspective in Divine, but still caught in a cycle into his eighties, unresolved.

Although his paintings on the covers and throughout both Regent Press Berkeley’s books are beautifully reproduced and well-executed; his repetition of woman-as-object, everyone-as-other and everywhere-as-lonely lean towards too much. There’s little dialogue, which he admits he’s “not good at” writing; characters are named but barely described, and the only really good narrative of his environment comes in a day-long trail ride up and down a high Sierras mountain with his friend Bill.

Divine matured as he went along, especially in “Freud’s Story,” about his Mother. She had survived the Armenian Genocide, but a million others did not. It’s an outstanding portrait, much more empathetic, descriptive and narrative than the internal self-examinations of the other pieces. She had Petros, called “Pete” in the U. S., and there were “seven years of happiness” before her second husband had a stroke, working in a sewing factory and then working at home with no time for complaints. 

The word “love” comes up a lot in Divine, but Najarian’s fear and resentment stop him right at the edge of the trust and openness that real love needs to live and grow. According to Freud, that’s his Mother’s fault. (Not.)(Traumatic “ancestral memory?”)

The “eternal boy” who feels abandoned: “Remaining a bachelor son, however, can be so painful I want to die… the older she grows the more enlightened she appears, and nothing seems to bother her except the ants in her kitchen.” (He fails to haul the concrete to patch her walls, however, and she, elderly, injures herself trying to.) 

“Keep the refrigerator full and the sheets clean and the walls clean and everywhere clean because that’s what being a mother meant, to feed and to clean and not to complain about petty things.” 

Maybe he could take a life lesson from hers?


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Navigate Change, Foster Resilience, and Co-create the Cities We Need

 Speculative Futures: Design Approaches to Navigate Change, Foster Resilience, and Co-create the Cities We Need by Johanna Hoffman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

30 March, 2023, published as “Pushing ThOur Boundaries,” The Berkeley Times, Knox Book Beat.      

      Speculative Futures: Design Approaches to Navigate Change, Foster Resilience, and Co-create the Cities We Need, by Johanna Hoffman, (2022) from Berkeley’s North Atlantic Books, is simply marvelous. An absolute relief when contemplating not only the common-sense/realistic but the fantastic/boundless transformations as SIMULTANEOUSLY POSSIBLE. 

      She may be “all spin,” but I don’t care. Anybody who uses examples from Blade Runner and Black Panther; calls out the “negative impacts of 1950s urban planning" as well as the racism/classism of the 2020 Oakland “Slow Streets” redevelopment; and has chapter titles like “Shared Language” and “Collective Imagination” has my interest and support right away. 

    

     She knows the structures must be “doable,” even though “the future is not a destination, but a process and a path.” (p. 150) Hoffman (Joanna in Wikipedia) herself is diversely undefinable as marketing executive, urban planner and “had a reputation at both Apple and NeXT as one of the few who could successfully engage with (Steve) Jobs,” particularly in writing the first draft of the Macintosh User Interface Guidelines. (Wikipedia) 

“Speculative futures tools help us:
        • challenge the status quo
        • increase individual and social resilience
        • balance short-term needs with long-term change, reorienting our understanding of cities toward more adaptive capacity
        • create more collaborative and equitable development by supporting cooperation over persuasion (My italics. wc) (I particularly like that one)
        • shift our collective imagination toward resilient possibility and cultivate more proactive planning as a result.”

      Her “Takeaway: By giving us permission to imagine, speculative futures encourage a shift in attitude from “What’s the problem?” to “What’s possible?” In doing so, they question our assumptions about existing norms to see if they’re really the paradigms we want to shape what lies ahead. … Speculative futures offer practices that create the forward-thinking, adaptive plans that modern uncertainty requires.”
“This is the time for imagination…Assuming that devastation is the entirety of what’s ahead is limited thinking. What if the best times are still to come? We owe it to ourselves and future generations to ask. The tools to help us ask are there. We just have to use them.”

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Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology

Goodreads -- ***** Five Stars

30 March, 2023, published as “Pushing ThOur Boundaries” in The Berkeley Times, Knox Book Beat.    

     Sci Fi, fantasy, mythology and even folklore twists written as far back as the 1960s and 70s are part of Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology, from Oakland’s PM Press.       

Published in 2015, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer skillfully selected a profound, exotic, global array of “feminist” women writers and stories for the anthology, from Octavia E. Butler’s brilliant 1987 “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” to Rachel Swirsky’s sexy, surreal and subtly philosophical 2008 “Detours on the Way to Nothing” and Vandana Singh’s triumphant 2003 “The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet,” seen through the eyes of her baffled, self-righteous husband and his unsuccessful attempts to dominate or even restrain her (and his own) transformation. 

     I use the VanderMeer’s term “feminist” in quotes, because, as they amply demonstrate, that term has blossomed and diversified as vastly their stories do since The Second Wave of the 1960s, far further than suffrage and legal rights: “Broadened the debate to include a wider range of issues: sexuality, family, domesticity, the workplace, reproductive rights, de facto inequalities, and official legal inequalities,” (Wikipedia) (2 March 2023  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-wave_feminism  17 March 2023). 

     The “bad old days” of violent masculism, colonization, rampant, rape-and-pillage commercial-industrialism and techno-social gentrification are “back at us” in the 2000s with some short-term gains and many, many long-term losses hidden from view and right out in the open. For some humans, it is only “that much easier” to become global, autocratic despots and slave-owners, consciously or automatically. For others, total hand-to-mouth mindless labor and/or disaster oppress and loom overhead. 

     The term “speculative fiction” as a genre label goes back at least to 1889, but Robert A. Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land) related it to science fiction in an editorial in the Saturday Evening Post in 1947. Since then, authors like Judith Merrill, Harlan Ellison and Margaret Atwood used the term to re-form and push the boundaries of restrictive “science fiction.” Certainly, H.G. Wells’ 1895 The Time Machine and George Orwell’s 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-four’s political, social, gender and bio-engineering themes foreshadowed both age-old and pivotal questions of propaganda, war, ecological devastation and reproductive tyranny hammering down on us now.

     Some of these are rewrites of the Pygmalion and Galatea myth, others set in futures dystopian, utopian and questionable. Butler “began her story wondering how much of what we do is encouraged, discouraged, or otherwise guided by what we are genetically…biology, medicine and personal responsibility.” (p. 128) 

     In 1979, Tanith Lee turned “the traditional sword and sorcery tale” on its head in “Northern Chess;” and in “The Screwfly Solution,” (James Tiptree Jr./ Alice Bradley Sheldon 1977) “When It Changed,” (Joanna Russ 1972), “The Men Who Live in Trees” (Kelly Barnhill 2008), “Boys”” (Carol Emshwiller 2003) and “Fears” (Pamela Sargent 1984) the authors all posit places, societies and times that may or may not be Earth, future, past or contemporary. (photo Nichelle Nichols, NASA Recruiter, as Nyota Uhura in Star Trek: The Next Generation)

     They suggest condemnation, warnings and/or fleeting hope. There is a small, but very important, part of human life, mind, heart and spirit that is sexually and hormonally determined. It need not be entirely generalized nor delineated by government, religion or society. ThOur evolutionary pluses and minuses can be weighed, examined and balanced. “Speculative fiction” demonstrates amazing possibility, scope and flexibility through story, language and reframing, far beyond the distressed (and undressed) damsels on the covers of 1950s Fantastic magazines.  

     A wonderful and thought-provoking anthology, now available as an e-book, too.

Rainbow Weather: Poems for Environmental Healing - John Curl

 Rainbow Weather: Poems for Environmental Healing by John Curl

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

John Curl got his Rainbow Weather: Poems for Environmental Healing to me after Poetry Flash’s Watershed. If you are pondering whether to give a graduate or special friend a copy of Omar Khayyam’s The Prophet as a token of your pride, respect, love and esteem; you should give them Rainbow Weather instead. It’s that good, and just about as timeless, as well as more timely in the sense of contemporaneous currency.

The way he writes has Khayyam’s eternal quality, however, too. As one of the founders of Berkeley’s Indigenous Peoples Day who spent a year with the Navajo Nation in 1970 and since then working for Indigenous people’s rights, he says he’s a “Historian celebrating the accomplishments of native cultures and the works of ancient American poets.” 

He sounds like it, and has earned his chops as an activist in the craftspeoples’ collective movement of the East Bay and as a writer of poetry, “translator, fiction and non-fiction writer on social justice and historical perspectives,” too. Pronouncements. Incantations. Riddles in plain sight. Listen…
“our purpose in life is to ascend back to
that all-knowing state we originated from.” The Purpose of Mirrors

“America is suffering.
America is grieving from a broken heart.” What’s Wrong With This Country?

“The rider on the crest of the hill
contemplates the long road
watching both sun and rain in
the distance, searching the horizon.” Knight of Pentacles

If I had just one book to take into a high school or junior high school English class, this would be it.

“Sometimes the search for a livable
world can seem like dancing with
a lover who lets you just near
enough to almost touch her with
your outstretched fingers, then
dances away into the shadows
and mists just out of reach.

Yet what can we do but follow her
love song into those elusive mists over
and over again, until we make her ours.”

Book review published in The Berkeley Times, Knox Book Beat, 23 February, 2023


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Stories for Clever Children - James M. LeCuyer

 Stories for Clever Children & All Curious and Thoughtful Adults by James M. Lecuyer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

James M. LeCuyer’s Stories for Clever Children & All Curious and Thoughtful Adults is the offshoot of a disturbingly multifaceted writer. You really never know what he’s going to make happen next, but it’s always totally cool and just right. He is wacky, deeply philosophical in a totally plebeian way (if that’s possible), occasionally obscene, vacillatingly frightened, outrageous, furious, bizarre, practical and snort-laughingly funny while also being completely understandable to anyone with a slightly open mind.

I’m going to read his Duck Lessons tonight, even before I send this to my editor, and going out tomorrow to buy his poetry, A Brick for Offissa Pupp, and stories, Threnody for Sturgeon, even though I don’t remember what a threnody is and could probably get them from him or Floating Island and Outskirts Presses for free. 

He’s that good.
You should, too. And I don’t often say should, especially about spending money, even for books.

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Tempered by Fire: A History of the Berkeley Fire Department

“There is a fault line running through our country…We are not only killed by earthquakes, we are killed by poor building standards.” A man whose brother and nephew were killed in Kahramanmaras, Turkey, interviewed by Jane Ferguson, 10 February 2023, PBS News. 

Tempered by Fire: History of the Berkeley Fire Department, 3rd ed., by Linda P. Rosen, is a very timely piece of public safety history considering our recent “year-round” wildfire season, global climate change and other disasters, as well as the horror of the earthquake in Turkey (since the Hayward Fault lies right under the Clark Kerr Campus in Berkeley).

Why is this in “Knox Book Beat?” Because Rosen’s history of the BFD points out not only the tremendous heroism, reorganizations, mechanization and sacrifices of the Fire Department and their personnel through the years, but the frank foolishness shown by voters, government, land and resource developers in spite of “Not Enough Water” “to fight fires.” (p.1)

In the “grass-covered hills” left by the conquistadors, missionaries and ranchers; Gold Rush miners, settlers and speculators planted flammable “eucalyptus groves and Monterey pines,” building “wooden buildings” and “brown-shingle houses” after the oak and sequoia/ coastal redwood water-condensing forests had been stripped off. “Tapping springs, damming creeks, building reservoirs, and installing tunnels and aboveground lead pipes” “could not solve the problem” in 1883, 1893, and beyond; even with paid City firefighters replacing scattered volunteer units in 1905.

Narrow, winding streets and huge homes on brush-filled lots were built back in crowded areas after hill fires of the more devastating 1923 and 1991. Berkeley City Council “acted on Chief Rose’s fire report” proposing a new fire code, “but the lumber companies and the shake-roof industry actively campaigned against it, and the ordinance was repealed in a citizen’s referendum in May 1924.” In the aftermath of 1991, “Fire Chief Cates proposed sweeping changes,” some of which were implemented, but “the salt water system and cisterns were not constructed (until 2000 p. 43). Many businessmen were afraid that disruption during construction would cause economic loss.”

Are University of California Berkeley, larger landlords and developers paying in enough to fund the public services necessary to save lives and livelihoods as well as investment properties? 2005, 2011, 2014 and 2016 saw warehouse and church fires fought, and there was a six-alarm high-rise fire in November of 2020 that took three days to extinguish. As Rosen concludes, “Ravenous life rebuilds, no lessons learned” even though “an officer stands guard.”

https://berkhistory.org/product/tempered-by-fire/

This book came to Knox Book Beat from John Aronovici of the Berkeley Historical Society & Museum. He knows me from our volunteer group, Community for a Cultural Civic Center, who have been observing and avidly participating in the City’s process of planning the transformation of the Martin Luther King Jr. Park, Maudelle Shirek Old City Hall Building and the Veterans’ Memorial Building, particularly since at least December of 2019. The Historical Society is in the Veteran’s Building now and is proposed to move into Maudelle Shirek, where Berkeley Community Media is already serving Council and the Public.

Seismic upgrades of both of the historic buildings have been one of the CCCCs priorities; and we, the Downtown Business Association and MANY other “members of the public” helped fund assessment and pricing of proposed retrofits and improvements; now very urgent in light of the failure of Measure L.

Please get involved in your local municipal, county and state governments to monitor policies, budgets and priorities. Thank you.

Published 23 February, 2023 as "Tempered by Fire," in The Berkeley Times, Knox Book Beat.

Berkeley Historical Society, P.O. Box 1190, Berkeley, CA 94701 info@berkhistory.org

 

Ethical Psychic - Dr. Jennifer Lisa Vest

 Applying a Psychic Physic to a Pretty Sick World - 

One Relationship at a Time?                 January 26, 2023

The Ethical Psychic: A Beginner's Guide to Healing with Integrity, Avoiding Unethical Encounters, and Using Your Gifts for Good by Jennifer Lisa Vest
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

 Spiritual workers like Matthew Fox, Jean Shinoda Bolen, Vicki Noble and Joanna Macy have been working for decades on unifying mind, body, spirit and community; as well as cultural, religious and arts workers breaking down the pyramidic hierarchies of power-over dominance that have been stunting our growth towards a viable, healthy omnisphere. 

     Indigenous healers have been doing it for millennia. Dr. Vest lays it out, plain, simple, with clear explanations of colonialist, culturally appropriative, disrespectful, “arrogance and inauthentic claims of authority” named for the “exploitation” that they are. The Ethical Psychic: A Beginner’s Guide to Healing with Integrity, Avoiding Unethical Encounters, and Using Your Gifts for Good. 

     Maybe due to the ongoing asocial disembodiment of pandemic isolation, you are now entering the Twilight Zone of Berkeley literary arts. “Woo-woo” means “(derogatory slang) based on or involving irrational superstition,” which is how various people define everything from centuries-old organized religious and dietary traditions to the latest totally whacked-out online conspiracy theory. Depending, of course, on where we fall on the infinitely long, linear, shifting and nuanced rational-irrational/fact-superstition spectrums.
     

     Dr. Jennifer Lisa Vest spoke on zoom to the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists last fall and this weekend (November 2022), and North Atlantic Books of Berkeley sent me Ethical Psychic soon after. NAB is a “nonprofit publisher committed to a bold exploration of the relationships between mind, body spirit, culture, and nature…aims to nurture a holistic view of the arts, sciences, humanities, and healing.” This is where humanity and the planet need to go, and the sooner the better.      

     I was skeptical at first, but had already heard Afro-Indigenous mixed-race Dr. Vest, Bachelor of Science in Physics from Hampshire College, Ph. D. in Philosophy with a dissertation on “Critical Indigenous Philosophy: Disciplinary Challenges Posed by African and Native American Epistemologies,” and felt convinced that this scholar with life experience and multiple apprenticeships was the real deal. I was not disappointed. 

     This is not only for intuitives and brujas, but ALL kinds of healers, and frankly, government employees, physicians, nurses, (MIDWIVES!) social workers, therapists and others who work with the public in both regulated and unregulated service professions. It wouldn’t hurt the Mayor, City Councilors, police officers etc. to start thinking of thOur community as somewhere that absolute authenticity, financial and resource transparency, integrity, “sensitivity to client needs,” privacy, humility, clear interpersonal boundaries, “focus and attention” are respected; where “intuition and rationality must be combined” “that will assist the client on their own chosen path.” 

     An entirely ancient and incredibly do-able metamorphosis and evolutionary step homo sapiens could take right now with our amazing brains, technologies and creativity to truly relearn how to resuscitate a thriving world community and geosphere once more. If it can be dreamed, it can be done?

     Neo-paganism, women’s support groups and Jeremy Taylor, Cecilia Engelhart and Stanley Krippner’s dream groups have been marvelously enlightening from 2010 to the present for me here; to say nothing of Donald Rothenberg, James and Jane Baraz’ meditation and other Spirit Rock sessions and retreats, gamelan concerts and partaking in the sumptuous international cultural, culinary, intellectual, arts and spiritual feasts available in Berkeley and the Bay Area in general. There IS “gold rush” speed, greed and flash here, but a lot of cutting-edge human potential support, innovation, experimentation and longing to return to profound health, traditional values and culture happening, too. 

     I felt humbled and honored to dance in the post-pandemic return of the Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park Indigenous Peoples Day Pow Wow, but in the same way, Solstice Berkeley Times "Critter Divination," for example, one human being does NOT “make sacred” space. “Sacred space” exists everywhere, and can be called up through respect, ritual and attention. 

     The vocal and ritual calling out and naming of spatial interrelationships, animate and inanimate powers and beings by a spokesperson aware of their own flaws, omissions and background submitting to a respected group of humans gathered for that purpose merely focuses attention on the sacredness that's already there.  

     A wise healer (artist, storyteller, mayor, teacher, medical professional) knows VERY WELL, FIRST AND FOREMOST, “It isn’t about me." "Matter and energy are neither created nor destroyed.” We protect our “own health, traditions and values,” are “able to acknowledge and learn from mistakes” and be “guided by something larger than yourself.”

     As in astrology, “the stars impel” or “incline” occurrence, “they do not compel.” At the same time, there are neuro-biological tides that have been working in ways we “understand” only in “irrational” ways coming to us over thousands and thousands of years. We have done our best to track, chart and delineate them in language, literature and custom; as well as in storytelling, ritual and song.      

     What’s going to work to save Mother Earth? One relationship at a time? Right now? Do we have the answers already in the neuro-biological recesses of ThOur body/souls? Beyond habit? Beyond the “old normal?”

https://drvestmedicalintuitive.com/
 

A short version of this review was first published as "Ethical Evolutions" in Knox Book Beat, The Berkeley Times, Wyndy Knox Carr.


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